Is an Alabama home rumored to be a former mob hideout the “Scariest House in America?” According to a new HGTV series, it’s in the running.
For Halloween season, HGTV is serving up a spinoff of its “Ugliest House in America” series. The four-episode miniseries “Scariest House in America” premiered Oct. 4, with comedian and actress Retta promising “haunted houses, ghosts and goblins, nightmares, jolts, frights and me” as she travels “across the country in search of the nine scariest houses we can find.”
“I did not see this iteration of this show coming,” Retta said in an HGTV promo. “I was cool with the summer road trip and ugly in paradise, but, for a gal that is spooked by every creak, critter and errant hair that brushes my shoulder, this wasn’t it. Glad I got through it, but I won’t lie and say I ‘enjoyed’ it.”
After visiting the Northeast in the first episode and the Midwest in the second, Retta rolls deep into the South in the third episode, which will premiere at 8 p.m. Central time on Friday, Oct. 18. Her trek brings her to Gulf Shores, to a solid-concrete home on Bright’s Creek off the Bon Secour River.
We’re told the home dates to 1901-1906 and that “It was built by Nick Crump, and he was married to Al Capone’s sister, Winnie, who we think used to come here and hide out. That’s the rumor.”
There are maybe some problems with that. Gulf Shores, which wasn’t incorporated until the late 1950s, was extremely rural in the earliest years of the 20th century. One local history says the community didn’t have a rail connection until 1905, another says it didn’t get a post office until 1947, a decade after the completion of the Intracoastal Waterway. So the construction of a 4,000-square-foot concrete home along the area’s backwaters would have been quite a marvel.
Also, Capone appears to have had only one sister who survived to adulthood, Mafalda Capone. She didn’t get married until December 1930, when Capone’s run as a crime lord was coming to an end. He did have an aunt Winnie, though her married name was Coughlin.
That said, Capone did spend a lot of time in the Miami area. He bought an estate there that served as his family’s home after his empire crumbled, and that’s where he died in 1947. In his glory days he’s believed to have made runs to coastal Mississippi, staying at the Gulf Hills Hotel in Ocean Springs, and many believe he vacationed/hid out along the Florida Panhandle at times. Bear in mind that for a time in the 1920s Capone was a rock star, a man who was wealthy, powerful and seemingly untouchable despite Prohibition. He might not exactly have been a folk hero, but rumors sprouted into legend wherever he went – and wherever he might have gone.
So, can we suspend disbelief and accept that maybe Capone had a hidey-hole in Gulf Shores? If we’re watching a show about ghosts, sure, why not?
This much is certain: The Gulf Shores home would have made a fine gangster haunt. And it definitely puts Retta entertainingly out of her comfort zone, even before she hears that one its spectral inhabitants is a butt-grabber. “Mob house or not, it’s pretty creepy,” she says.
The episode gives us a brisk, fun visit to a what-if that puts a different spin on the whole Southern Gothic thing. And then Retta hits the road again: “Next on my terrifying journey, I’m headed to a little town known for being the birthplace of jazz, home to Mardi Gras, and the kind of place where you’re always in for a good time,” she says. “I’m in New Orleans, baby.”
In the fourth episode of the series, airing Oct. 25, one of the nine featured houses will be deemed the scariest. The winning homeowners get a $150,000 renovation by HGTV designer Alison Victoria.
